Andrew Aitken "Andy" Rooney (born January 14,
1919) is an Americanradio and television writer. He is most notable for
his weekly broadcast A Few Minutes With Andy Rooney, a
part of the CBS News
program 60
Minutes since 1978.

Biography

Youth

Andrew Rooney was born in Albany, New York, the son of Walter
Scott Rooney (1888–1959) and Ellinor (née Reynolds) Rooney
(1886–1980). He attended The Albany Academy, and later
attended Colgate University in Hamilton in Upstate New
York, where he was initiated into the Sigma Chi fraternity, until he was drafted
into the U.S. Army in August 1941. While in the
Army, he began his career in newspapers in 1942 when he began
writing for Stars and Stripes in
London [1
] during World War II. He later published a memoir,
My War (1997) about his war reporting. In
addition to recounting firsthand several notable historical events
and people (like the entry into Paris, the concentration camps,
etc.), Rooney describes how it shaped his experience both as a
writer and reporter.

In February 1943, flying with the Eighth Air Force, he was one of six
correspondents who flew on the first American bombing raid over Germany. Later, he was one of the first
American journalists to visit the German concentration camps as World
War II wound down, and one of the first to write about them.

CBS
career

Rooney joined CBS in 1949, as a
writer for Arthur Godfrey's Talent
Scouts, when Godfrey was at his peak on CBS radio and
TV. The program was a hit, reaching number one in 1952, during
Rooney's tenure with the program. He also wrote for Godfrey's
daytime radio and TV show Arthur Godfrey Time. He later
moved on to The Garry Moore Show, which
also became a hit program. During the same period, he also wrote
for CBS News public
affairs programs such as The 20th Century.

According to CBS News's biography of him, "Rooney wrote his
first television essay, a longer-length precursor of the type he
does on 60 Minutes, in 1964, 'An Essay on Doors.' From
1962 to 1968, he collaborated with the late CBS News correspondent
Harry Reasoner
— Rooney writing and producing, Reasoner narrating — on such
notable CBS News specials as An Essay on Bridges (1965),
An Essay on Hotels (1966), An Essay on Women
(1967), and The Strange Case of the English Language
(1968). An Essay on War (1971) won Rooney his third
Writers Guild Award. In 1968, he wrote two CBS News specials in the
series Of Black America, and his script for Black
History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed, won him his first Emmy."
[2]
Rooney also wrote the script for the 1975 documentary FDR: The
Man Who Changed America.

In the 1970s, Rooney wrote and appeared in several prime-time
specials for CBS, including In Praise of New York City
(1974), the Peabody
Award-winning Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington (1975),
Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner (1976), and Mr. Rooney Goes
to Work (1977). (Transcripts of these specials, as well as
some of the earlier collaborations with Reasoner, are contained in
the book A Few Minutes with Andy Rooney). Another special,
Andy Rooney Takes Off, followed in 1984.

A Few Minutes with Andy
Rooney

Rooney's "end-of-show" segment on 60 Minutes,A Few
Minutes with Andy Rooney, originally Three Minutes or So
With Andy Rooney, began in 1978 as a summer replacement for
the debate segment Point/Counterpoint featuring Shana Alexander
and James Kilpatrick. The segment proved
popular enough with viewers that beginning in the fall of 1978, it
was seen in alternate weeks with the debate segment. At the end of
the 1978-79 season, Point/Counterpoint was dropped
altogether.

In the segment, Rooney typically offers satire on a trivial
everyday issue, such as the cost of groceries, annoying relatives,
or faulty Christmas
presents. Rooney's appearances on A Few Minutes with Andy
Rooney often include whimsical lists (e.g., types of milk,[3]
bottled water brands,[4]
car brands,[5]
sports mascots,[6]
etc.). In recent years, his segments have become more political as
well. Despite being best known for his television presence on
60 Minutes, Rooney has always considered himself a writer
who incidentally appears on television behind his famous walnut
table, which he made himself.

Rooney's shorter television essays have been archived in
numerous books, such as Common Nonsense, which came out in
2002, and Years of Minutes, released in
2003. He also pens a regular syndicated column for Tribune Media Services that runs
in many newspapers in the United States, and which has also been
collected in book form. He has won three Emmy Awards for his
essays,[7]
which now number close to 1,000. He was awarded a Lifetime
Achievement Emmy in 2003. Rooney's renown has made him a frequent
target of parodies and impersonations by a diverse group of comedic
figures, including Frank Caliendo, Rich Little and Beavis.

Though Rooney has been called Irish-American, he
once said "I'm proud of my Irish heritage, but I'm not Irish. I'm not
even Irish-American. I am American, period."

In 2005, when four people were fired at CBS News perhaps because of the Killian documents
controversy, Rooney said, "The people on the front lines got
fired while the people most instrumental in getting the broadcast
on escaped." Others at CBS had "kept
mum" about the controversy.[12]

Andy Rooney was briefly interviewed on HBO's Da Ali G Show, where he became one
of the only guests to be so annoyed by Ali G that he furiously ended the interview
several minutes into it. Before ending the interview, he repeatedly
corrected Ali G when he used "does" as the conjugation of the verb
"to do" in the second-person singular when addressing Rooney. When
Ali G said, "I think that's an English/American
thing going on," Rooney replied, "No, no. That's English. The
English language is very clear. I have fifty books on the English
language if you'd like to borrow one." In Rooney's frustration near
the beginning of the interview, he intentionally misspelled his own
last name as Runey when Ali G asked him how it was
spelled.

Racial
remarks

Rooney has occasionally been accused by critics of insensitive
use of ethnic and racial labels. In a 2002 commentary, Rooney
addressed the use of the term Negro this way:

“

Our thoughts about words
change over the years. In 1968, I wrote a television show called
Black History, Lost, Stolen or Strayed for Bill Cosby. I remember
being uneasy with the word black because the acceptable
word back then was Negro. Today, I wouldn't use
Negro. It's a good, strong word, but now it sounds wrong
to me.

Different ethnic groups of Americans have always had terrible
nicknames for each other. I remember hearing them as a kid. You
don't hear them much anymore because they always make the person
using them sound like such ignorant jerks.

He also wrote a column in 1992 that it was "silly" for Native-Americans to complain about team
names like the Redskins saying, "The real problem
is, we took the country away from the Indians, they want it back
and we're not going to give it to them. We feel guilty and we'll do
what we can for them within reason, but they can't have their
country back. Next question."[14]

In a recent column for Tribune media services, he
wrote, "I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today's baseball stars are
all guys named Rodriguez to me." Rooney later commented, "Yeah, I
probably shouldn't have said it, [but] it's a name that seems
common in baseball now. I certainly didn't think of it in any
derogatory sense."[14]

Rooney has always denied that he is a racist. In the 1940s, he
was arrested after sitting in the back of a segregated bus in
protest.[15] Also,
in 2008, Rooney applauded the fact that "the citizens of this
country, 80 percent of whom are white, freely chose to elect a black man as their
leader simply because they thought he was the best choice." He said
that makes him proud, and that it proves that the country has "come
a long way - a good way."[16]

Suspension by
CBS

In 1990, Rooney was suspended without pay for three months. This
punishment was for saying that "too much alcohol, too much food,
drugs, homosexual unions, cigarettes [are] all
known to lead... to premature death." Also, he wrote an explanatory
letter to a gay organization after being ordered not to do so, a
letter many found offensive and distasteful. After only four weeks
without Rooney, 60 Minutes lost 20 percent of its
audience. CBS management then decided that it was in the best
interest of the network to have Rooney return immediately.[17]

After Rooney's reinstatement, he made his remorse public:

“

There was never a writer
who didn't hope that in some small way he was doing good with the
words he put down on paper and, while I know it's presumptuous,
I've always had in my mind that I was doing some little bit of
good.

Now, I was to be known for having done, not good, but bad. I'd
be known for the rest of my life as a racist bigot and as someone
who had made life a little more difficult for homosexuals. I felt
terrible about that and I've learned a lot.

[...] What do I do to justify the action David Burke, the
president of CBS News, has taken in putting me back on air? [...]
It's overwhelming.... Let's face it, even on the nights when I'm
good, I'm not that good.

Remarks on Kurt Cobain's
suicide

In a 1994 segment, Rooney attracted controversy with his remarks
on Kurt Cobain's suicide. He
expressed his dismay that the death of Richard Nixon was overshadowed by
Cobain's suicide, stating that he had never heard of Cobain or his
band, Nirvana.
He went on to say that Cobain's suicide made him angry. "A lot of
people would like to have the years left that he threw away,"
Rooney said. "What's all this nonsense about how terrible life is?"
he asked, and he added, speaking rhetorically to a young woman who
had wept at the suicide, "I'd love to relieve the pain you're going
through by switching my age for yours." "What would all these young
people be doing if they had real problems like a Depression,
World War II or Vietnam?" "If he
applied the same brain to his music that he applied to his
drug-infested life, it's reasonable to think that his music may not
have made much sense either." Later, Rooney admitted that he might
have been "unfair" and apologized on air.[19]

Family
life

His wife of 62 years, Marguerite "Margie" Rooney (née Howard),
died in 2004 of heart failure. Rooney later wrote, "her name does
not appear as often as it originally did [in my essays] because it
hurts too much to write it."[20] He
has four children, including a daughter, Emily Rooney, who is a TV talk show host
and former ABC News
producer; she currently hosts a nightly Boston-area public affairs program,
Greater Boston, on WGBH. His son, Brian Rooney, has been a
correspondent for ABC since the 1980s. Another daughter, Ellen, is
a photographer based in London. Emily's identical twin, Martha, is
Chief of the Public Services Division at the National Library of
Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland.